Koki Emura's office doubles as a music library. When you enter the room in an omnibus building located near Shinsaibashi, Osaka City's densest commercial district, you're greeted by a gallery of EM Records' recent releases. When I visited him earlier this year, the gallery contained New Games / Rhythm & Sound from the local minimalist band Goat, a solo EP from veteran keyboardist Emerson Kitamura, a best-works compilation of Thai mor lam singer Banyen Rakkaen and a collection of Japanese regional folklore festival music from 1982.

For 20 years, Emura has worked full-time, solo, running EM Records. "Anyone can start a label and put out a record, but keeping it going is another thing," he said. "There are many people who can tell you how to start it, but nobody can teach you how to sustain it for a long time. The advantage of running it all by yourself is that you don't have team or company meetings to make decisions. That saves a lot of my time." EM Records launched in 1998, after Emura left his position as a record buyer at noted digging spot Jellybean Records in Osaka, where he started working part-time as a university student.

Inside his office, the largest wall is covered by floor-to-ceiling shelves holding his personal collection of vinyl, cassettes and books. The bookshelf is filled with titles like Ethnic Music Encyclopedia, Jamaican Patois Dictionary, A Guide To Indonesian Music, Japanese Music History and The Blues Book. A small desk sits in the centre of the room, with two speakers neatly positioned on both sides of the computer screen at ear level, tilted inwards ensuring the sweet spot is just right. In front of his seat there are original artworks for three of Roland P. Young's albums, two of which were painted by Young's wife. On the left side of his desk is his CD collection, with a Trojan Dancehall Explosion compilation alongside an Alvin Lucier album and numerous titles I have never heard before. In the back of the room, near the window facing the street, sits a portion of EM Records' two-decade catalogue.

The collection in Emura's office includes music from almost every corner of the world in a huge variety of styles from various eras. Pretty much all of it is obscure. EM Records has reissued gems from the past, but the label has also released cutting-edge contemporary music. It's hard to comprehend how much musical knowledge Emura has accumulated over so many years of working with records and being at the centre of Osaka's vibrant scene.

It's possible that you already own some of the EM Records catalogue without knowing it. While the label always has beautifully packaged products—around half of which have been designed by Emura himself—the visual presentation is always focussed more on the content than the label.

"It shouldn't be about the label," he said. "What I do is just some background, administrative work really. What's most important is the music, so I don't mind if people don't know my label. Most people don't anyway!"

Though EM Records is a one-man operation, Emura does get some help—the likes of Riyo Mountains (a DJ duo with expertise in Japanese folk music), Soi48 (another DJ duo that specialises in Thai gems) and Koya Abe (a musician and the owner of a specialised secondhand store in Tokyo called Noahlewis' Records) all share their knowledge. But ultimately it comes down to Emura's taste.

"I just love listening to everything," he said. "It's been my habit for many, many years. I love buying records and CDs, and I've been basically spending the profit I made with selling music on buying more music. I don't have the desire to do much else. As a label owner, you also need to be aware of what's out there and what the trends are. That's a necessary duty for my job. I have the tendency to look for weirder, stranger music, because I can't get excited with mediocre stuff anymore."

Emura's initial motivation to start his own label two decades ago was business driven. "I started it around the time when record sales were at their peak. Everyone was buying records like crazy, and I was quite obsessed with selling them too," he chuckled. The label's first release was a CD reissue of a 1970 album called This Is Us by the British band Harmony Grass. "Back then, CDs were priced slightly higher than vinyl, so more affluent customers were buying CDs. Because I worked for a long time as a record buyer, I already knew all the distributors. It wasn't difficult to start my own business and sell records. Unlike now, it was still very costly to press CDs and print sleeve notes in late '90s, so I basically had to recoup the production costs from the previous release to pay for the next. I had a side job for the first few years, but in 2000, I decided to concentrate full-time on EM Records."

Emura's approach took a dramatic turn in 2003, when he had a near-fatal traffic accident around the time the label was gaining some momentum. "I did think that was it," he said. "I lost my kidney and spleen—they were completely crushed. It's a miracle that I'm still alive and am able to do what I do now. Until that point, I had a strategy to somehow keep the business and my personal pleasure separate, and I was focusing on building a good business by putting out titles that sell, before releasing the music I really love. But after my near-death experience, I realised I didn't have time to waste." He laughed. "So I invested all the money I received from insurance for the accident into my record label."

Emura elaborated on the enlightening moment he had in the hospital. "You know how you don't hear music in hospitals? Shortly after the accident while I was still hospitalised, I went into the rehabilitation room for training, and there I heard Camille Saint-Saëns's 'The Swan' playing. And before I knew it, tears were running down my cheeks. It was a very powerful experience I'd never had before. Music really spoke to me."

He shared another episode from his time in hospital. "I had to go through multiple major surgeries, and I hallucinated from heavy anaesthesitic before one of them. As I was pushed into the operation room, I said to my wife, 'I know there's a huge record archive in the hospital. Please don't forget to ask the doctor where it is and take me there later.'" He laughed again. "Isn't it fascinating what a record collector says when he's on the edge of his life?"

After his recovery from the accident in 2004, Emura changed the label logo and added an illustration of a human heart around the label name—a comic-like depiction of vibration coming out of the heart, a symbol of life, reaching to an ear. "I 'sampled' this design from the cover of an extremely obscure record," he said. "I'm not gonna reveal what it is because that's no fun." Emura's message was clear: a declaration of delivering music that comes straight from the heart.

EM Records' steady flow of around five to seven albums a year picked up upon entering this new phase, to seven to ten albums annually. It has accelerated even more in recent years, with a fresh title basically coming out every month. "That's just out of necessity, really," he said. "In an ideal world, I want to give each title time to breathe and the customers a break too, because not that many people can afford to buy stacks of records all the time, like in the '90s." With the latest releases of up-and-coming Japanese ambient producer 7FO's second album, Ryu No Nukegara, and a reissue of Japanese festive folk music in collaboration with Riyo Mountain, titled Kizaki Ondo By The Kizaki Ondo Preservation Society, the catalogue number stands at 179.

Among the 179 records he (re)introduced to the world, I asked Emura to pick some of the most popular ones. He mentioned 2016's Yumi Kagura by Shigeo Tanaka. On the EM website there are comments from Awesome Tapes From Africa and Ben UFO praising this vinyl reissue of a 1990 cassette tape of Japanese religious ritual chants accompanied by various traditional instruments. The 2014 reissue of Angkanang Kunchai With Ubon-Pattana Band's Isan Lam Plearn from Thailand, according to Emura, is one of the most loved records from his catalogue. "This one was particularly popular in Europe," he said as he pulled out British post-punker Brenda Ray's D'Ya Hear Me!: Naffi Years, 1979-83. "Count this one in too," he added as he handed me El Secreto De Las 12 (The Secret Of 12 O'Clock), a compilation by Spanish experimental ambient rock outfit Finis Africae.

What's noticeable about EM's recent releases is that there's an increasing ratio of newly recorded original music and Japanese hidden gems. There have been albums by Osaka acts Synth Sisters and YPY, EPs by Germany polyrhythm specialist Don't DJ and New Zealander percussion ensemble From Scratch. "There were not many reissue labels around when I started EM, but there are so many of them now," Emura noted. "It all became predictable with reissues. It's 100 times easier to rerelease an existing record than produce one from scratch. So introducing entirely new music is more challenging and keeping things interesting for me."

I asked Emura one last question: how do you discover the music you release?

"I just listen to music all the time," he responded. "I listen to everything I haven't listened to. If the only way to listen to a specific record is to purchase the vinyl for 100,000 yen, then I buy it. But in terms of the value of the music, I treat every musician equally. I give the same conditions to the artist regardless of their profile. I consider it important for me to keep my ears as bias-free as possible. I don't look for records in search of my new product, but when you have been buying and listening to so many records, you develop a good hunch for a captivating one. I'm always prepared to come across the music I'm destined to encounter at any moment, and practically, the only way to identify it is by listening. It's music. You need to listen."

Label of the month mix

Experience the breadth of the EM Records catalogue with this selection by the Osaka DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu, who digs out some label highlights.

Tracklist /
Nora Guthrie - Emily's Illness (EM1083)
Haku - Hawaii's Own (EM1136LP)
The Sakai Ishinage Odori Preservation Society - Yose Daiko (EM1171LP)
Jun Arasaki And Nine Sheep - Kajyadhi Fu Bushi (EM1176)
Synth Sisters - I Am Here (EM1175LP)
Roland P. Young - Twirling (EM1087LP)
Yoshi Wada - Singing In Unison (EM1109LP)
Finis Africae - Thunder Men (EM1118LP)
Angkanang Kunchai - Lam Phloen Ramwong Lao (EM1157LP)
Shintaro Sakamoto x VIDEOTAPEMUSIC - A Night In Bangkok (EM1158TEP)
KUFUKI And Rifu Otsu - The Countryside Is Great (EM1172TEP)
The Kizaki Ondo Preservation Society - Kizaki Ondo (EM1179LP)
Tapes - No Broken Hearts On This Factory Floor (EM1146SP)
Don't DJ - Forest People Plot (EM1161TEP)
YPY - RIP 505 (EM1153DEP)
Synth Sisters - Until The World Breaks Up (EM1175LP)
7FO - Ryu No Nukegara (EM1178LP)
Syntoma - I'm The Worst Of The Worst (EM1134LP)
YPY - Gazing Beat (EM1153DEP)
Compuma Meets Haku - Compuma Re-edit (EM1141MLP)
Finis Africae - Magical Ceremony In The Pond (EM1118MLP)
Noahlewis' Mahlon Taits - Valley Of No Return (EM1100LP)